Beyond brief glimpses in some blurry Instagram photos, nobody outside the West Wing has seen or heard any version of the State of the Union address President Barack Obama will deliver Tuesday night. But if, sometime during that speech, anyone watching at home starts to get the funny feeling this one sounds familiar — they won’t be wrong.

That’s true even though, technically, this year’s version doesn’t even exist yet — at least, not in its final form: the president is still laboring on revisions, say aides, with late tweaks likely.

But long before the final draft is loaded into the teleprompter, we already know that Obama will almost certainly speak for a little less than an hour, and be interrupted for applause between 80 and 90 times. We know that some point, he’ll tell a corny joke and give a single shout-out to Vice President Joe Biden. And we know he’ll probably wrap with some variation on “God bless the United States of America.”

As for everything that comes before that kicker: We can be pretty sure that Obama’s speech this year will be very much like the speech he gave last year, and the one before that, stretching back to the start of his first term — or even further, for those with longer memories — because his State of the Union remarks, like those of his presidential predecessors over the past two decades or so, have all followed roughly the same template.

Here’s the standard SOTU formula in a few simple steps: first, hit the economy and jobs. Circle through a laundry list of priorities, requests for congressional action, and new executive actions in the works. Throw in a few emotionally resonant stories of ordinary Americans doing things that serve a broader administration message. And land on a big, uplifting showstopper finish.

Obama’s first five annual addresses to Congress all followed this roadmap religiously.

It’s not that White Houses haven’t, over the years, tried to change the repetitive nature of the State of the Union — but the utilitarian nature of the speech dictates it remain largely unaltered.

“Around this time of year, wise elders come in to the speechwriters and say, this year don’t have it be a laundry list, make it eloquent, it should be a tone poem,” said Michael Waldman, the director of speechwriting in Bill Clinton’s White House. “In the end, they all sound like some form of a laundry list. It’s the nature of the speech, it’s the chance that in our system that a president gets to set out the agenda and its invariably wide-ranging.”

There is little variety in the structure of State of the Union addresses because it has become a ritual political event during which Americans expect a laundry list of proposals, not an elegant piece of presidential oratory, said former Bill Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry.

McCurry said there were regular discussions about whether to turn Clinton’s annual addresses to Congress into something bigger and more thematic – like Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin’s state of the state speech earlier this month that focused entirely on what he called a “full-blown heroin crisis.”

“That theory always gets blown apart by the pollsters who say the American people like hearing their issue addressed during the State of the Union and you better address it,” McCurry said. “We don’t have one pressing concern as a nation, with the exception of general unease about jobs and economy and concern about implementation of health care. There’s nothing that kind of frames this speech in a different way from what we’ve seen in the past.”

While Obama and the White House have branded 2014 “a year of action,” Tuesday night won’t be the first time Obama has declared himself ready to act without Congress.

Heading into his re-election campaign in 2012, Obama warned that he wouldn’t allow Congress to stop him from building on progress the economy had made since he took office.

“As long as I’m president, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum,” Obama said then. “But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”

The White House hasn’t begun the annual tradition of revealing the newsy nuggets from the State of the Union, but White House press secretary Jay Carney on Monday that Obama will use the address to lay out how he will proceed in 2014 — with or without congressional cooperation.

Carney said it is “exciting” to for the White House to have a year without facing down an economic crisis and with an executive action-laden agenda that can’t be bogged down by an uncooperative Congress.

“We have not had an opportunity like we see this year when it comes to the state of our economy and the potential for it to grow and create jobs without either the enormous headwinds of the worst recession since the Great Depression or the Eurozone crisis, or, beginning in 2011, the ideological roadblocks that were thrown up by Republicans in Congress,” Carney said.

“It’s very exciting to be here and confronted with the opportunity to take action that the president sees before him, and that means working with Congress where Congress will work with us, and it means moving forward using his authority where Congress won’t work with us.”

One Obama-specific hardy perennial the president stresses in every State of the Union – and in almost every speech he makes – is that he inherited a troubled economy, has presided over a comeback that’s threatened by Republicans and will keep working to ensure the country doesn’t revert to Bush-era policies that enriched the wealthy at the expense of others.

Starting in 2009, in his first address to a joint session of Congress, Obama said he wouldn’t blame Bush for country’s economic woes, even as he proceeded to do exactly that.

“Now, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that for too long we have not always met these responsibilities, as a government or as a people,” Obama said. “I say this not to lay blame or to look backwards, but because it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.”

In 2010 he kicked off his speech with a reminder of the bad hand he’d been dealt.

“One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by a severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse, and a government deeply in debt,” he said. “Experts from across the political spectrum warned that if we did not act, we might face a second depression. So we acted — immediately and aggressively. And one year later, the worst of the storm has passed.”

By 2013, after four years in office and his re-election, Obama could no longer overtly blame Bush. Instead he called fixing the economy his “unfinished task” and said his administration had “cleared away the rubble of crisis.” Though his reminders that he inherited the recession remained, they became less explicit, focusing instead of the recovery he presided over than the recession itself.

“We gather here knowing that there are millions of Americans whose hard work and dedication have not yet been rewarded,” Obama said in last year’s address. “Our economy is adding jobs — but too many people still can’t find full-time employment. Corporate profits have skyrocketed to all-time highs — but for more than a decade, wages and incomes have barely budged.”

But there’s at least one area where this president doesn’t follow the same yearly pattern: Since it passed in 2010, Obama hasn’t devoted much State of the Union time to his signature health care law.

In 2011, he joked that the new GOP House majority opposed the law, then added what has become a verbal tic: an invitation for Republicans to help improve the law they sought to repeal.

“I have heard rumors that a few of you still have concerns about our new health care law,” he said then. “So let me be the first to say that anything can be improved. If you have ideas about how to improve this law by making care better or more affordable, I am eager to work with you.”

There were minimal mentions of Obamacare in 2012 and 2013, with Obama saying last year that the law “is helping to slow the growth of health care costs.”

This year, Obama will be obligated to explain the messy Obamacare rollout and reassure Americans that he’s a competent steward on health care issues, Waldman said.

“Since it passed, he barely has talked about it in these speeches,” Waldman said. “The administration can’t really say, ‘How come nobody knows it’s a wonderful law?’ If he’s not willing to stand up and spell it out and say what he thinks works well and what hasn’t worked well, there’s no reason to expect the public to know about it.”